Carrier IQ Is Not Spyware And Is 100% Safe

There’s been a lot of paranoia and anger at cell phone companys ever since a young somewhat inexperienced researcher named Trevor Eckhart posted video footage showing how many popular phones use Carrier IQ to collect data on your mobile phone.

If you don’t know what Carrier IQ is it’s a software on your phone that lets customers track when, where and how you are using your cellular phone, solely for the purpose of troubleshooting. The diagnostic information it provides makes troubleshooting cell phone issues a lot faster because every time you contact your carrier about a problem with the Carrier IQ log is pulled and sent to your cell phone company to show problems like dropped calls, random outages and even force close issues.

It’s a simple program, that does a lot but because of a lack of company transparency it’s gone the ire of privacy experts who argue it is an invasion of privacy. The thing is do you really care about privacy when it comes to phone performance? The software cannot record messages, keystrokes, phone calls, webpages or even emails. That’s why I find the call to remove it ridiculous. I mean isn’t it a good thing for cell phone companies to keep track of how many dropped calls and possibly what may be causing them?

Now maybe this service should have been optional but consumers need to use common sense before getting upset and crying foul. This software is less of an invasion that an Internet tracking cookie yet people act like he stole their identity or something. Chill out people, and before you jump to any conclusions do some research on your own and stop relying on sensational journalism.